The Logic of Christendom

August 28, 2012

Today, the principles of the “moderate” Enlightenment are what pass for a conservative inheritance to be opposed to the excesses of liberalism, an inheritance “We the People” were supposed to have “secured to ourselves and our posterity” following the American Revolution. These principles include:

• A hypothetical “social compact” or contract as the foundation of the State.

• The origin of political sovereignty in the “consent” of the governed (invariably presumed to have been given by those who happen to be wielding power).

• “Government by the people” according to the “sovereignty of the people,” meaning strict majority rule on all questions, including the most profound moral ones.

• Church-State separation and the non-“interference” of religion in politics.

• The confinement of religion, above all the revealed truths of Christianity, to the realm of “private” opinions and practices one is free to adopt (or to denounce) if it pleases him, but which are to have no controlling effect on law or public policy.

• The unlimited pursuit of gain, including the freedom to buy, sell and advertise anything whatsoever the majority deems permissible by law.

• Total liberty of thought and action, both private and public, within the limits of a merely external “public peace” essentially reduced to the protection of persons and property from invasion by others—in sum, a “free-market society.”

• The dissolubility of marriage, and thus the family, as a mere civil contract founded on a revocable consent.

We are witnessing the final outcome of the operation of these “moderate” principles in the life of the individual, the family and the State. That this “conservative” inheritance was actually a radically liberal and inevitably disastrous departure from the millennial Western theologico-political tradition is now considered a proposition bordering on madness even by the most “conservative” opponents of contemporary liberalism. And yet a radical departure it was—a departure that emerged a full-blown system of thought during the epoch of the “Enlightenment” (roughly 1650–1800), whose first practical triumph, as we shall see, was the American Revolution, “the program of enlightenment in practice”1 and “the Enlightenment fulfilled.”2 In order to appreciate “the radicalism of the American Revolution,” to borrow the title of Gordon Woods’s landmark Pulitzer Prize-winning study on the subject, it is necessary first to appreciate what has been dismantled and forgotten in the Age of Liberty whose official inauguration took place in America in 1776. Here the briefest of sketches must suffice.

The Greco-Catholic Synthesis

In his famous Gifford Lectures on the Enlightenment, published under the title The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, Carl L. Becker observes with the frankness of an honest and accomplished scholar that even before 1776 the philosopher of the Enlightenment had overturned in thought the “medieval world pattern, deriving from Greek logic and the Christian story.”3 By this Becker means the synthesis of the two great elements of the Western theologic-political tradition that began in Athens after its fall in the 4th century bc, when Socrates, with “his summons to men to ‘care for their souls’ … turned the mind of Greece toward a new way of life … a newer and higher ideal of state and society” that “ended with the search for a new God.”4

The “Greek logic” of the Platonic-Aristotelian system developed for the first time in Western history a philosophical realism, ethics and politics based on the view of man as a creature possessed of a rational and immortal soul who inhabits an orderly universe, a universe in which everything has a fixed and objectively knowable essence determined by nature, which “makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose.”5 For Plato, these essences were the Forms, residing in a separate realm of perfection of which the sublunary world is but a replication. For Aristotle, with his “hylomorphism,” which became the Christian philosophical doctrine of matter and form, every being in the orderly universe is a “substance,” a subsisting unity of matter and the form that determines its nature; and the soul, as the Christian tradition would also teach, is the form of man. For Aristotle, as for the Christian philosophical tradition, the forms are to be found in the existing beings themselves which the mind really encounters through the senses in an “adequation” (equalization) of itself to the real world.

In the Greek view of man, assimilated and adapted to the Christian view in light of revelation, the rational soul is ordered by nature to the practice of the virtues of which it alone is capable—above all prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice, the last being the sum of all virtues in social relations. Man’s happiness—man being the only creature even capable of rationally seeking and knowingly experiencing happiness—does not consist in mere pleasure or material gain for its own sake, the vice Aristotle called pleonexia. It consists, rather, of an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. And the highest state of virtue is communion with God (Plato) or the contemplation of God for those who are capable of it (Aristotle). This is the summum bonum the Greeks sought by unaided reason centuries before the revelation of the New Testament and the concept of the beatific vision.

Why is happiness an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue? Aristotle’s answer is teleological: because man has a soul, which is clearly of a higher order than the body it rules, and because man is capable of exercising virtues, which are clearly of a higher order than the bodily instincts (the need for food, warmth, and so forth) he has in common with the lower animals. Since man is clearly designed for the practice of virtue, his true happiness must consist in virtue, as nature never endows anything without a purpose and “it would be an odd thing if man chose to live someone else’s life instead of his own”6—that is, the life of a lower animal. With good reason is the bad man called “an animal” in common parlance. Men who live as animals are unhappy and cause unhappiness in others.

Given man’s very nature as an ensouled creature whose end is the life of virtue and the encounter with God, both Plato and Aristotle teach that man’s perfection requires life in the State, originating in the society of families with its organs of government. The state is “a creation of nature” and “man is by nature a political animal,”7 as Aristotle so famously observes. Hence for the Greeks, as for the Christian statesmen who will follow them centuries later, the good State is the one whose laws and institutions take care of the soul by promoting and protecting both virtue and religion over and above mere security in person and property. For the Greeks of 4th century Athens, as it would be for the Catholics of Christendom, religion was not merely a private affair but also involved “regular public honoring of the divine.”8

Accordingly, says Plato, the good citizen—who is the same as the good man—will “keep himself from all the legislator lists in his count of things base and bad, and exercise himself with all his might in all that is in the contrary table of all things good and lovely” in order to avoid “deformity on the finest thing he has, his soul.”9 The disjunction between “private” and “public” morality that is a dogma of Liberty did not exist for Plato and Aristotle in Athens any more than it would for the Christian in Christendom. “The same things are best for individuals and states,”10 as Aristotle declares in the Politics.

On this point several details of Plato’s hypothetical construction of the good State are pertinent, even if others, such as the abolition of the nuclear family and private property, represent pagan wisdom gone astray and are repugnant to the Christian worldview. The first is legislation providing for the religious festivals of the State in keeping with the tight integration of religion and public life in the Greek polity.11 The religion of the State as a reflection of the religion of the people was, of course, a fundament of political society throughout European history until well into the 19th century. For it is obviously nonsense to say that the individual, but not the collective of individuals making up the State, has duties to God. If there is a true religion, and the great preponderance of people profess it, then the State will naturally and logically profess it as well. Catholic teaching was uncompromising in its defense of this perennial element of Western political organization. Writing more than 2200 years after Plato, Pope Leo XIII declared: “God it is who has made man for society, and has placed him in the company of others like himself, so that what was wanting to his nature, and beyond his attainment if left to his own resources, he might obtain by association with others. Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless…. Since, then, the profession of one religion is necessary in the State, that religion must be professed which alone is true….”12 Leo’s successor, Pius X, insisted as recently as 1906 that the members of the State owe God “not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him.”13 This dictate of practical reason, proceeding from the premise of Christ’s divinity and His foundation of a teaching Church, was recognized even by Jacques Maritain, the renowned but inconsistently progressivist and proponent of “integral humanism,” when writing in his traditionalist mode:

We must affirm as a truth above all the vicissitudes of time the supremacy of the Church over the world and over all terrestrial powers. On pain of radical disorder she must guide the peoples towards the last end of human life, which is also that of States, and, to do that, she must direct, in terms of the spiritual riches entrusted to her, both rulers and nations.14

The radical disorder of which Maritain wrote is the core of the crisis of Western civilization. Also important for our purposes is Plato’s advocacy of State censorship of immoral and indecent material in the arts and in literature.15 Plato defends this basic feature of all traditional Western legal codes with admirable common sense.

In Book III of The Republic, Socrates prescribes laws forbidding indecent and immoral poetry so that the young elite “may not be bred among the symbols of evil, as if it were in a pasture of poisonous herbs, lest grazing freely and cropping from many such day by day they little by little and all unawares accumulate and build up a huge mass of evil in their own souls.”16 Precisely the same rationale is found in Catholic teaching more than two millennia after Plato: “[L]ying opinions, than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt the heart and moral life should be diligently repressed by public authority, lest they insidiously work the ruin of the State.”17 The great historian of philosophy, Frederick Copleston, here notes an obvious truth that today is dismissed with howls of liberal outrage:

[T]he principle that animated him [Plato] must be admitted by all who seriously believe in a objective moral law, even if they quarrel with his particular applications of the principle. For, granted the existence of an immortal soul and of an absolute moral code, it is the duty of public authority to prevent the ruin of morality of the members of the State so far as they can… 18

According to the same rationale, Plato defends penalties for public offenses against the religion of the State. Public atheists and heretics, or those who set up private temples for false worship, are subject to imprisonment, banishment and even death.19 Contemporary liberals likewise denounce the idea that public offenses against religion ought to be punished, but this too was a basic feature of traditional Western legal codes, and for perfectly logical reasons. For if religion is the way to eternal happiness, and if the corruption of religious truth leads to eternal misery, the members of the State have a right to protect themselves from the effects of the public dissemination of religious error. Hence Catholic teaching constantly condemned the idea that the best condition of civil society is one in which “no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted liberty, the god that failed penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion….”20 There is no social truth more obvious than that the spread of religious and moral falsehoods has disastrous temporal as well as eternal consequences. The crisis of our civilization lies in the refusal of political modernity to recognize that the truths of revelation are ineradicably connected both to the integrity of the moral order in society and to human happiness and flourishing in this world and in the next.

The foundational Greek view of the role of the State in the life of the whole man, which would be defended throughout the centuries of Christendom, is summarized in Aristotle’s Politics:

But a state exists for the sake of the good life; and not for the sake of life only…. It is clear then that the state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life … by which we mean a happy and honorable life…. [P]olitical society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of living together.21

Given this function of the State, Plato (like Aristotle) viewed pure democracy as a deadly absurdity, likening its action upon the State to the governance of a sailing ship by a mutinous and drunken crew, who celebrate “the man who is most cunning” among them and make him captain, while the true pilot, with his indispensable knowledge of navigation, is rejected as an impractical stargazer.22 Of the three basic political constitutions—monarchy, oligarchy and democracy—monarchy is best, provided the monarch is a philosopher-king who governs according to the truth derived from his knowledge of the Forms. In Book V of The Republic, however, Plato levels a criticism of kings that applies with equal force to any ruler who fails to govern according to truth and justice: “Unless, said I, either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately … there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucoma, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either.”23 This admonition, mutates mutants, applied to the Christian ruler whose source of truth included the Gospel revelation expounded by the Church as well as right reason.

The Politics of the Soul

If one phrase could describe the Greek view of Man and State it would be this: the politics of the soul. Indeed, Greek philosophy “led the way into the newfound land of the soul,” producing “a new order of values … worked out in the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle,” which “paved the way for the universal religion, Christianity.”24 As Copleston observes in his monumental history of philosophy: “It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Plato in the intellectual preparation evangelical of the pagan world.”25 Likewise, “the natural theology of Aristotle was a preparation for the acceptance of Christianity.”26 Moreover, “the political theory of Plato and Aristotle has indeed formed the foundation for subsequent fruitful speculations on the nature and characteristics of the State.”27 Thus the Catholic Church has never ceased to recognize her debt to the veteran sapient of the Greeks, which “served, surely, to herald the dawn of the Gospel which God’s Son, ‘the judge and teacher of grace and truth, the light and guide of the human race,’ proclaimed on earth.28

To the Greek foundations of natural theology, ethics and political philosophy the “Christian story” added its own theological and philosophical superstructure, producing “the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church,”29 which reached its fullest and most systematic expression in Thomistic philosophy. The Greco-Catholic synthesis:

• reveals the God for which the Greeks were seeking;

• explains man’s tendency to commit evil, and the fact of evil in the world, as consequences of the Fall of man on account of the original sin of our first parents;

• offers fallen man redemption through the grace won by the Redeemer, which repairs the defects of the rational soul clouded by Original Sin;

• completes (in the Aristotelian-Thomistic system of Thomas Aquinas and other medieval scholastics) the Greek picture of philosophical realism—a hierarchically ordered universe of divinely created and fixed natures or substances, with man and his rational soul at its visible summit and God as its highest good;

• adds the theological virtues (faith, hope and charity) to the cardinal virtues explored by Plato and Aristotle (prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude), and the concept of punishable transgressions against divine law—sins—to offenses against the natural order, concerning which there had been no explicit divine “ought” or divine prohibition in Greek philosophy.

With the Greco-Catholic synthesis comes an understanding of human freedom as involving, not only the practice of virtue, but liberation of the soul from the effects of sin. However obscured by sin, the divine ought is written onto our hearts in the form of the natural law, whose first precept is that “Good is to be done and pursued and evil to be avoided.”30 What is good, of course, is specified in the Decalogue—summed up by the love of God and neighbor—revelation as a whole, preeminently the Gospel, and the dictates of right reason, aided by revelation and perfected by grace, which enlightens the darkened soul. In the New Testament “sin” is a translation of the Greek word hamartia, which means to “miss the mark.” By hitting the mark according to the divine plan, man achieves the end for which the Greeks were seeking in their obscure understanding that arête, human fulfillment in the excellence of virtue, and with it the good life in the good State, would seem to require what Plato called the moira—a divine dispensation.31 That dispensation is sanctifying grace: “Being then freed from sin, we have been made servants of justice.”32

In the realm of philosophy, the Greco-Catholic synthesis baptized and confirmed the philosophical realism of Aristotle with his simple insistence that the world is just as we see it: an ordered hierarchy of beings with fixed natures and purposes; a vast ensemble of substances composed of matter and the form that makes each of them, above all man, forever one thing and not another. Aristotle, writes G.K. Chesterton, “took things as he found them, just as Aquinas accepted things as God created them.” The philosophy of St. Thomas “stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs,” just as God made them to be. The Thomist, with Aristotle, thus “stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God.”33 It was Western man’s very certitude about the real that the Enlightenment divines, pouring through the opening created by Descartes, Hobbes and Locke, would attack with unrelenting ferocity.

The Christian Commonwealth

Finally, the Christian story solved the dilemma Plato confronted in The Republic and The Laws: that the good State requires good men, but good men cannot be formed without the assistance of a good State. Taking the road “along which God himself is so plainly guiding us,”34 to quote Clinias in The Laws, the Christian story arrived at a destination neither Plato nor Aristotle could foresee: Christendom. If one phrase could describe the perennial Greco-Catholic synthesis on Man, God and State, it would be this: the politics of the soul in the commonwealths of Christendom.

“Where there is no justice, there is no state,” declared Augustine, the first Catholic political philosopher. “But true justice,” he argued in City of God, “is not to be found save in that commonwealth, if we may so call it, whose Founder and Ruler is Jesus Christ.” Hence even in its greatest days the Roman Republic presented “merely a colored painting of justice, as Cicero himself suggests, while meaning to praise it.”35 Justice, Augustine concluded, “cannot be predicated of pagan states, as they do not render justice to God.” The just state, therefore, is the Christian state, and an organic relation between the temporal and the spiritual power whose polestar is the Gospel of Christ will insure the justice of its laws.

In all its forms, and with all its human imperfections, the Christian commonwealth perennially exhibited the “Gelatin dyarchy”36 of two distinct but organically united powers, the temporal subject to the spiritual in matters of morality and justice, where the jurisdictions of the two powers overlap. In all the centuries of its existence the dyarchy never admitted of any divorce between religion and politics, or the secular and the religious. In the universal fellowship of Christendom the Church was the conscience of the State and the soul of the body politic, just as religion (albeit pagan religion) was tightly integrated into the life of the Greek state.

In sum, ancient Greek thought sustains the logic of Christendom. Given the acceptance of the theological premise that Christ is God Incarnate, and thus the very summum bonum for which the Greeks were seeking, Christendom can be justified not only by an appeal to faith but also to rational principles on the nature of God, Man and State uncovered by the Philosophers in the explorations of unaided reason. Thus, some twenty-two centuries after Plato and Aristotle lived and taught, Pope Leo XIII was able to declare that “the Christian organization of civil society [was] not rashly or fancifully shaped out, but educed from the highest and truest principles, confirmed by natural reason itself.”37

The Christian commonwealth is the good State for which Plato sought with his utopian method, the State that would be called “Magnesia—or whatever name God will have it called after,” which “is not to be equaled in future ages.” It is the “dream on which we touched” that would someday “have found its fulfillment in real and working fact….”38 As the great Harvard classicist Werner Jaeger observes in his monumental work Paideia:

Neither the ancient city-state nor the national ideal of the fourth century, but the universal fellowship of Christendom laid the foundations for the fulfillment of Plato’s hope. That religious foundation was something far broader than the Greek nation which Plato had addressed. But it was similar to the Platonic scheme in this: it was not an abstract universal brotherhood of man; instead it was identical with the concrete Christian … brotherhood, whose component nations continued to belong to it even in time of war.39

In their superficial reading of The Republic and The Laws contemporary conservatives and libertarians see a “statist” and “totalitarian” conception of social order harboring “the germs of Marxism, National Socialism, Islamism, and other forms of utopianism.” Read with discernment, however, Plato’s utopian speculations represent a search for the kind of ecclesiocentric polity that would emerge after the Incarnation, one in which the leavening effect of the Gospel would preclude both totalitarian and majoritarian tyranny. “The perfect design for living given in The Laws,” writes Jaeger, “is like nothing so much as the year as conceived by the Catholic Church, with its holy rites and liturgies laid down for every day.” Plato was seeking no mere State, as the superficial reading would suggest, but rather a great educational system for the formation of souls in which the State would merely play a part. And, notes Jaeger, “if we think of the greatest educational institution of the post-classical world, the Roman Catholic Church, it looks like a prophetic anticipation of many of the essential features of Catholicism.” Plato’s search thus presupposes precisely what the modern State has denied institutionally: that “[i]n reality only God is worth taking seriously, and what is divine in man,” meaning “the logos, the cord by which God moves man…. If humanity is not seen in that divine perspective, it loses its own independent value.”40 And so it has in political modernity.

In the correspondence of Alcuin of York to Charles the Great (Charlemagne) during the Carolingian Renaissance of the late 8th century we find the connection between the hope of Athens and the rise of Christendom being drawn explicitly. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, wrote Alcuin, “it may be that a new Athens will arise in France…. The old Athens had only the teachings of Plato to instruct it, yet even so it flourished by the seven liberal arts. But our Athens will be enriched by the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit41 and will, therefore, surpass all the dignity of earthly wisdom.”42 This was no pious exultation from a religious zealot blinded by fideism, but the recognition by a great intellect of an historical, intellectual and spiritual reality then unfolding, one that would create the very basis of Western culture: the New Athens that was Christendom.

The “component nations” of Christendom would endure in all or parts of the Western world for some sixteen hundred years—from the edict of Milan in 313 until the fall of the House of Habsburg and the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. Their residua endure even today in certain predominantly Catholic countries of the Western world, such as Ireland and Malta, although the last remnants of their Christian legal codes and customs are under relentless attack by the European Union, the United Nations and other contemporary agencies of Liberty. It will be the burden of this study to show that the crisis of our civilization lies precisely in its all-butcomplete repudiation, in the name of Liberty, of the things that made it Christian.

Footnotes

Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press [1932], 2003), 5–6. We do not accept Becker’s thesis of a veiled continuity between the “heavenly city” as conceived in the tradition of Christendom and the Enlightenment’s new notion of a “heavenly” city. As the renowned historian of the Enlightenment Peter Gay has maintained, the thesis is “charming” but simply not true. That the two “cities” perform similar functions does not establish continuity between the old and the new worldviews. Gay calls this the “fallacy of the spurious persistence.” Cf. Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism, 535. Like Gay, who is not even writing from a Catholic perspective, we insist upon the patent discontinuity between traditional Christianity and the so-called Enlightenment.

Leo XIII, Libertas (1888), no. 23. There are innumerable examples of this teaching in papal encyclicals and even in the recently promulgated Catechism of the Catholic Church, which calls for the prohibition and destruction of pornography by the State and the State regulation of mass media to protect public morality. CCC no. 2354 (“Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials”).

Pius IX, Quas Primas (1864). Despite all appearances to the contrary, this Catholic teaching, affirmed by numerous popes, remains intact in principle, even if the practical impossibility of its application today is conceded.

Cf. Republic, 492e (“And you may be sure that, if anything is saved and turns out well in the present condition of society and government, in saying that the Providence of God preserves it you will not be speaking ill”).

Romans 6:18.

G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (NY: Random House, 1974), 121.

Laws, 968c.

Demetrius B. Zema, S.J. and Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., trans., The Fathers of the Church: Saint Augustine, the City of God, Books 1–7 and 17–22 (Catholic University of America Press, 1950).

From the historic declaration of Pope Gelasius I in his letter to the Emperor Anastasius (494) on the supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power in cases of conflict: “There are two powers, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority of the priests and the royal power. Of these that of the priests is the more weighty….”

The virtues infused by the operation of the Holy Ghost in addition to faith, hope and charity: “wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord,” which “complete and perfect the virtues of those who receive them.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1831.

In Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (NY: Image Books, 1991 [1950]), 65.

Christopher A. Ferrara
Christopher A. Ferrara is a Roman Catholic attorney, pro-life activist, and journalist. He is the founder and current president and Chief Council of the American Catholic Lawyers Association. He is also a regular columnist of The Remnant newspaper and author of various books including the provocative and highly acclaimed, "The Church and the Libertarian".

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53 Comments

I realise what you were saying, you simply seemed to be equating the Aristotelian-Thomistic position to the Christian philosophical tradition. I have the utmost respect for St.Thomas, but, even if we exclude all post-Medieval schools of Christian philosophy (and most of them deserve to be excluded in my opinion) and the likes of Ockham and Duns Scotus, there are several other competing schools of traditional Christian philosophy. Those schools are essentially the Patristic, the Platonic, and the Palamist schools of Christian philosophy.

As an Orthodox Christian I think very highly of St.Thomas, but I do not necessarily consider him the preeminent philosopher of the Church, over, say, St. Clement of Alexandria or Dionysius, or the Cappadocian Fathers.

“[B]y presenting human life as a hierarchy of goods and ends, Aristotle’s teaching was vulnerable to the Christian claim that the good brought by the Church is greater, the end it reveals is higher, than any merely natural good or end. That is why the greatest Aristotelian after Aristotle was a doctor and saint of the Church: Thomas Aquinas. Thomas believed that Aristotle’s philosophy contained everything accessible to natural reason. The Christian revelation added other, higher truths, to these natural ones, but without invalidating them: “Grace perfects nature, it does not destroy it.”….

“Aristotle’s philosophy could thus be used in two conflicting ways: to oppose the Church or to strengthen the Church. The fact that it lent itself to both of these uses sufficed for demonstrating that it could not be the basis for a new political definition of relationships between the secular city-state and the Church.”

Manent has also written brilliantly on how the Enlightenment attacked the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of substance in order to destroy the ordered universe.

But at this point I must demur from further comments, as this could become an endless discussion in bits and pieces, about this or that, which is rarely fruitful for the participants.

“Here you appear to be equating the Christian philosophical tradition with Aristotelianism.”

No, I am merely noting, as have innumerable scholars through the centuries, that there is indeed an Aristotelian-Thomistic system, in which Thomas carries forward “hylomorphism” and the notion of “substance” into the doctrine of matter and form, which is a major indeed part of the the Christian philosophical tradition. See, very recently, “The Aristotelian-Thomistic Concept of Nature and the Contemporary Debate on the Meaning of Natural Laws,” by Tanzella-Nitti at the Pontifical Athenaeum of the Holy Cross. Thomas, of course, is the preeminent philosophical doctor of the Church.

“For Aristotle, with his “hylomorphism,” which became the Christian philosophical doctrine of matter and form, every being in the orderly universe is a “substance,” a subsisting unity of matter and the form that determines its nature; and the soul, as the Christian tradition would also teach, is the form of man. For Aristotle, as for the Christian philosophical tradition, the forms are to be found in the existing beings themselves which the mind really encounters through the senses in an “adequation” (equalization) of itself to the real world.”

Here you appear to be equating the Christian philosophical tradition with Aristotelianism.

It is only a minor point, but here you do seem to have placed the Patristic, Platonic, and Palamist philosophical schools of thought on the margins of the Christian philosophical tradition. Thomism has much to be admired, but I don’t think it is the only traditional Christian philosophical tradition.

Bellarmine does not teach any “right to revolution” for “breach of compact” possessed by any or all citizens. Catholic teaching allows for due resistance to tyrants. Locke’s teaching, founded on the origin of political authority in the “consent of the governed” is not the teaching of Bellarmine or the Catholic Church. Leo XIII thus expressly condemns insurrections against constituted governments, noting that Catholics submitted even to the authority of Julian the Apostate.

Actually, what constitutes “self-defense”? If the dictator did no direct harm to the village’s inhabitants but kept them malnourished through either intention or ignorance, would revolution be justified for the sake of the community’s survival? Another question would be whether – if they were reduced to slavery – “self-defense” would apply. Here I am thinking of the Haitian Revolution (ignoring for a moment the Enlightenment origins of the campaign and focusing on its ethical aspect) but also in the light of St. Paul’s advice to Onesimus. I would personally consider Paul’s advice to be limited to his own time as Roman slavery and race-based chattel slavery were two very different social realities.

Who could be the “lawful authorities” of the community? If a dictator comes in and executes the local government and places men of his own in their positions, could the village elders – for example – be considered “lawful authorities”? For the sake of the question, the neighboring powers have decided to buttress the authority of the tyrant.

What portion of the community constitutes “moral unanimity” in this scenario? Would this have to include the tyrant’s own officials and those members of the village who benefit from his rule?

” I believe Thomas Aquinas and some later Scholastics in certain cases justified revolution against a ruler…”

Not revolution but self-defense where the ruler has usurped the throne, in which case he is simply an invader who can be repelled, or where a ruler with lawful title governs so tyrannically as to threaten destruction of the realm, not merely the interests of certain individuals (like the Tea Partiers in Boston Harbor). And even then the deposition of the tyrant must involve the moral unanimity of the community and action by lawful authorities, not any mob that rises up. Again, this is not revolution as such, but rather a species of self-defense by the community.

The idea of a generalized “right to revolution” for any perceived “breach of compact,” with the right possessed by even one individual who considers himself aggrieved by a particular measure of government, originates with Locke. His doctrine was condemned as a subversive novelty by his own contemporaries.

“and certainly the Church promoted revolution (Mary Stuart, for example)”

This was not a revolution, but a restoration of Catholic succession AFTER a revolution had destroyed it, and deprived the Church of her property. Unless the usurper has acquired authority by prescription—reigning without opposition for a long time—Catholic teaching allows for his deposition as a counter-revolutionary form of self-defense. The Catholic writers note, however, that after the prescriptive period elapses (generally thought to be at least a generation), overthrow of even a usurper or his successor becomes illicit. This is why Leo XIII exhorted the French to embrace the Third Republic, despite its remote revolutionary origins.

“and civil disobedience in the reigns of the Tudors.”

Civil disobedience is not revolution, which is the overthrow of existing government.

“If anything, I had always thought the so-called “divine right of kings” was a specifically Reformation idea to justify the usurpation of spiritual authority by the converted princes against the Church.”

Yes, but that is a different question.

“Now, I agree that the American Revolution was an essentially Reformation-based ideology; however, “right to revolution” is something older than that.”

It is older than that, indeed. But its origins are not in traditional Catholic teaching. (The Jesuit Juan de Mariana was a radical outlier whose works were suppressed by his own order.)

I’m not sure that the “right to revolution” is solely an idea from the Reformation. I believe Thomas Aquinas and some later Scholastics in certain cases justified revolution against a ruler, and certainly the Church promoted revolution (Mary Stuart, for example) and civil disobedience in the reigns of the Tudors. If anything, I had always thought the so-called “divine right of kings” was a specifically Reformation idea to justify the usurpation of spiritual authority by the converted princes against the Church. Now, I agree that the American Revolution was an essentially Reformation-based ideology; however, “right to revolution” is something older than that.

Would church and state officials have a responsibility for protecting these minority groups in a nation where Catholicism specifically or Christianity generally dominates the culture? Isn’t this sort of protection and tolerence what got us where we are now?

The Protestant origin of a “right to revolution” on the part of any group or individual who deems the “compact” with government to have been breached is traced in my book, as is the radicalism of the American Revolution, which is the very title of Gordon Wood’s Pulitzer Prize-winning study.

Chris Ferrara, how do you deduce that “Revolution is a Protestant innovation”? The French Revolution wasn’t led by Protestants, nor was the Russian, nor especially was the Spanish. The American “Revolution” was really more a War for Independence, as it involved combatants by the Atlantic Ocean. Are you equating anti-Catholicism and Protestantism?
Viking

No it isn’t. That would not be possible without the conversion of the overwhelming majority of Americans to the faith. And if the overwhelming majority woke up to find itself Catholic, why could they not use democracy itself to enact their wish for a confessional state into law?

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That is a more accurate description of what is being advocated. See below.

<>>

Violent revolution is exactly what my book rejects. Revolution is a Protestant innovation. The transformation of America can occur without violence to existing structures if the hierarchy will lead the laity in a social and civil rights movement not unlike the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The resulting legal reforms, enacted in many cases alliances with Protestants, would not at all mean the establishment of Catholicism as the official religion of the United States—as desirable as that would be, were it possible. For example, the new Hungarian constitution, which bans abortion and gay marriage, was enacted by an alliance of Protestants and Catholics. It can be done. It has been done. Q.E.D.

<<>>

Which is precisely the point of my book’s argument against the very idea of revolution.

From a practical political standpoint, it would appear this article and discussion are useless to advancing distributism, unless they prove distributism is impossible to advance.

What I am hearinng is a call for a “fundamental transformation” in the U.S. The proposal, at its heart, is to establish Catholicism as the official religion of the United States.

While there is the long-term possibility of Catholicism becoming the dominate religion and driving the culture, the establishment of am official religion is unlikely without violent revolution. And the outcomes of violent revolutions are seldom the ones intended by the revolutionaries.

As always, I am impressed by the knowledge of those on this website steeped in university training in law, philosophy, theology, political science, history and economics. My training as an engineer leads me to the conclusion your designs are either flawed or incomplete.

Furthermore, at least theoretically Charlemagne – a brilliant and truly great man, really, for all his faults – allowed commoners to appeal directly to the crown in case of injustice through officials who traveled through the various estates.

Looking back at your other comments, however, I agree with you concerning the power of medieval kings. Certainly they were not totalizing dictators though many tried. The rival lords and the Church checked their power. Indeed, the constant theme of the Medieval Period was the monarchs attempting to gain such power through acquisition of land, simony, etc. Most of the time either the Church or the monarch found themselves beholden to either party – the Church earlier in the age and the monarch in the later period until the Black Death. The transition from the Medieval Period into the Confessional Age was marked by the rise of strong national monarchies such as in Spain, France, and England in definition against Christendom.

I don’t believe anything of the sort should occur; the only exception would be if they decided to do propaganda or any other such public exercise of false ideas. Because anything that occurs in the spiritual world affects the material, and vice-versa. I really believe the models of Salazar’s Portugal and the Colombia that was a Catholic republic in the 1800s were/are good models to use, that could be improved on. Protestants and the such will still worship freely, to the extent necessary for prudence; but of course, it will still mean acknowledge the State as being imperfect, since it is forced to tolerate a lesser evil for the greater good.

I understand. I am not so sure Jews voluntarily chose ghetto life, and I will have to double-check that. I think also that perhaps I am too provincial in thinking about America as the norm. In most other countries, the majority population at least is generally uniform ethnically, culturally, and religiously so that in Russia the involvement of the Orthodox Church is quite naturally an extension for the people. America is somewhat different because it is effectively still a WASP nation culturally so maybe it’s a harder reality to wrap my head around. As I think you indicated earlier, however, if Catholicism became the normative religion then a Church-State bind would be quite natural – something like in the Phillipines or Russia.

Also, would Catholics be able to leave the Faith without being deprived of property or losing citizenship or anything like that?

I am a history major/theology minor in a Catholic college right now, but my area of interest is the Middle Ages so I know little about the Confessional Age and how Protestants were treated in Catholic countries. I would like to ask what your understanding would be of the ability of these groups being able to publish materials and build houses of worship freely.

Of course, as you said, it wouldn’t have to be an exact copy of the Middle Ages or even a monarchy per se. How might a Catholic democracy look?

You forget in your example: the Jews chose to live in the ghetto, since they felt they would be defiled by the Christians; the laws simply took note of that and enforced it. And I am not advocating anything remote like the Middle Ages; but of course, the principles remain. Nonethless, for all their abuse of power, even the worse of medieval monarchs didn’t have the power to command millions to die for the false idol/god of Liberty. I’m sorry if I sounded a little harsh, but it seemed to me Todd didn’t approve of the teaching concerning Church and State relations. I really wouldn’t mind at all something similar to the state of relations between the Orthodox Church in Russia and the Russian state being done in states respectful of the Catholic Church and following Her moral direction.

I am not saying the Church does not have the right to be involved. What I am saying is that we must understand what we are asking for in practicality – namely the legitimacy of dhimmitude in Islamic states, for example. After all, is not dhimmitude precisely how Jews were treated in medieval states? I am asking you to see this from the perspective of a religious minority in such a country.

I would have no problem if a confessional state if I was guaranteed that persons would be free to worship God as their conscience permitted. This includes the freedom of Catholics to leave the Faith without harm to themselves, property, or liberty to express themselves. I understand the eternal consequences; however, that does not give us the right to impinge upon someone created in the image of God. Historically, this has just not been the case. My biggest fear is that we cannot condemn Islamic states for executing or harassing Christians today if Catholics – given an opportune majority of the population – would do the same exact thing.

Now, on the other hand, if you are merely asking for a relationship between the Church and State similar to what the Russian Patriarch of Orthodoxy and President Vladimir Putin have today I would be open to that.

Todd, I may not know anything about you, but I do know you are being woefully ignorant concerning the history of medieval Christendom. I take back my suspicions, but my observations remain: your words sound like that those of a practical atheist, since you apparently don’t subscribe to Pope Leo’s teaching concerning Church and State relations.

So, Dante and Todd, you don’t agree that the State (considered in its classical sense) and the Church should be cooperating with each other, according Pope Leo XIII’s teaching? The worst of pre-18th century monarchies was nothing compared to nowadays. And, Todd, show us this proof that kings were tyrannical in the Middle Ages; even the worst of them were checked by other forces and especially by the Church. The medievals had a decentralized government, compared to the democracies, republics, etc. of today. Complacency is on the part of human error, but that doesn’t make void the idea a happy union between Church and State; most theologians have taken that to be the meaning behind the Scriptural passage in which the Apostles presented Our Lord with two swords before the Passion.

What I meant by “the spiritual is still over the temporal concerning mixed matters,” is that that there are certain matters which are temporal, but indirectly connected to spiritual, such as regulation of marriages, education, and the such. In these case, the Church authority has the right to impose on the temporal, on the moral side.

Paul, I started my response primarily with respect to Gian. I haven’t finished elaborating it yet, though it may be some time before I get to it. As for this: “the spiritual is still over the temporal concerning mixed matters.” Perhaps you can elaborate what you mean by this.

I agree with Todd Lewis here. Like him, I sometimes question the wisdom of the Church’s alliance with Constantine despite its immediately perceived benefits. I would rather have an underground Church fighting peaceably for its life and promoting God alone as King (pace N.T. Wright) in opposition to a corrupt State than have a state religion which sinks gradually into complacency through a Eusebian providential vision of the Roman Empire as God’s chosen people.

As a side note, I read Cardinal Dolan’s speech at the Republican National Convention and felt as though I was hearing Eusebius of Caeserea eulogizing Constantine. And Mitt’s no Constantine. Please forgive for criticizing a cardinal, but I felt this verged on a deification of “America!” with which Puritans lampooned against “papists.”

You write that “conservatism” is a “an evolving political philosophy which has never been clearly defined,” but that “conservatism” seems “always to have acknowledged the existance [sic] of a Creator God” which “inevitably leads to the belief in an objective morality (i.e. Natural Law).”

But the mere acknowledgment of a Creator God and some sort of objective morality, rooted in some concept of natural law, already represents a radically liberal departure from the socially constitutive regime of revealed religion, defended by the Church in partnership with civil authority, that was Christendom.

The “conservatism” you describe is precisely what the “moderate”
Enlightenment has produced as a revolutionary replacement for Catholic social order: a society divorced from the guidance of the Church concerning what the natural and divine law alike enjoin upon men and nations.

This is why, as you say, “conservatism” is an “evolving” political philosophy. It has no mooring in the Gospel, and thus ultimately no mooring at all. Hence today’s “conservative Republicans” would have been viewed as liberal savages by the Democrats of only 75 years ago.

To save the West we need to restore the connection of the body politic to the Mystical Body. This indeed is a work that can begin from the ground up. But the thus far feckless Catholic hierarchy in America must supervise and lead the work.

What Catholic Social Teaching actually seems to do is take the organic image of the polis as a body (of course, minus the monarch as the head and the “Two Swords” theory held by Dante Aligheri in De Monarchia) from the MIddle Ages and Aristotelian philosophy. The result is much more similar, in my opinion, to the Democratic Party minus its commitment to bureaucratic, “top-tier” solutions and, of course, abortion and euthanasia which is a curious prioritization of freedom over equality.

I would disagree. The conservatism of the Republican Party is actually closer to the original Classical Liberalism of the “Enlightenment” in its prioritization of freedom over actual equality. Of course, the Democratic Party’s modern position – a more communitarian one – is simply the other branch of Liberalism which re-prioritized equality over freedom following the tremendous failures of laissez faire capitalism in the Gilded Age of the 19th century (that is, one of the two philosophies which Rerum Novarum protests). Of course, consequently, neither Party resembles 19th century Old Conservatism which in many ways is actually more communitarian in philosophy.

Let me first clarify that I am Catholic and have no intention of promoting the the triumph of the aggressively secular state. I am not saying that there is no highest Good towards which society should be ordered nor am I saying that liberty is in itself an end or an absolute good in the way that our libertarian brethren have construed it. Still, here’s the thing.

If you accept the premises of Aristotle and Plato (and Thomas Aquinas) and their vision of the state (as I do) in believing the entire cosmos is tended towards an End, then the actions of the Roman Empire and the Tokugawa Dynasty against Christians, the actions of Constantine against pagans, the actions of Aristotle in supporting the Macedonian cause against Athenian democracy, the call of Plato for a philosopher-king and the banning of certain types of music, and even the Communist educational system (hence, Alasdair MacIntyre’s assessment) become rigorously logical. To put it simply, all of them operate on the assumption of a knowable and coherent metahistorical system. Granted, even liberal democracies operate within the narrative of “Progress!”

“Forcible conversions” is not the point. I know that – in theory (by which Charlemagne did not abide in his war with the Saxons) – conversion must be freely willed. What I am trying to say is such a vision would look like this: the world divided up into metahistorical “phyles” (to borrow a concept from Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age) among Christendom, the Islamic Umma, Israel, and the Far East which would be divided between Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shintoism – which often had tense relations. Now, each would operate on its own philosophical system. While I do not agree with everything he says, I agree with Egyptologist Jan Assman in his division between so-called “primary” and “secondary” religions. The secondary religions are those which grew out of reform movements and, hence, evolved to become universalistic in scope to define themselves against their original contexts. These include Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the mystery cults of Rome, and Zoroastrianism. I would also include Communism and Liberalism as “secondary,” universalistic “religions” – all of them mutually exclusionary. This is precisely why Hilaire Belloc supported Zionism – namely, that Jews could not culturally exist alongside Christian Europe. Am I saying that this vision is a bad one? No. What I am saying is we have to understand the consequences of such a vision – that Christians would be severely restricted in all other phyles by the force of logic even if each of them accepted tolerance towards foreign religions – namely, the inability to freely convert people, publish materials or freely proselytize, or build churches. What I am saying is that Christians of all creeds, pagan Romans, the totalitarian vision of Plato, Shintoists, and Buddhists all held (prior to the rise of Liberalism – which in itself, depending on your perspective, is a “totalizing” worldview) to the same worldview and made their conflicts intractable. To put it simply and (pardon a Star Trek analogy), it’s the Federation versus the Borg. Although the Federation claims to be value-neutral, we can clearly see the value imperialism of Jean-Luc Picard when it comes to his attitude towards other cultures. Both the Borg and the Federation “assimilate”; both LIberalism and other “secondary” religions assimilate, and there can be no middle ground.

Everything was relatively stable regarding this worldview within the single phylum of Western Christendom (I mourn the tragic mutual excommunications of East and West) until the Black Death and a viable reformation, and then heresy, in Protestantism became a full-blown religion which shattered the unity of a phylum – beginning the tragic Wars of Religion. The Church always was forming, reforming, criticizing, and rebuilding itself in the Medieval Age. One can see that in Joachim of Fiore, Hildegard of Bingen, the Mendicants, the Benedictines, and the Gregorian Reform. Only one – that by Martin Luther – unfortunately ruptured the unity of Western Christendom.

Mr. Ferrara, on the issue of “conservatism” and “libertarianism” being “two strains of the same predominating liberalism which has been the suffocating atmosphere that Western man has been breathing for far too long.”

Liberalism and libertarianism certainly share the characteristic of placing individual liberty at the center of their thinking. Conservatism, however, is a more ambiguous term. It is a label for an evolving political philosophy which has never been clearly defined.

Political philosophy is a type of moral philosophy, and ultimately moral philosophies depend on answers to metaphysical questions. While liberalism and libertarianism answer metaphysical questions (and therefore moral and political ones) with relativism, conservatism (at least in this country) seems always to have acknowledged the existance of a Creator God. This inevitably leads to the belief in an objective morality (i.e. Natural Law).

While there are definitely liberal elements in the Republican party (especially libertarians), I am encouraged by the number of faithful Catholics in the party’s leadership.

A return to Natural Law and an acknowledgement our rights as individuals (and the rights of families) derive from a Creator God would seem to be a first step on the long road to the type of society you would like to see. Ultimitely, to succeed, a bottom up approach must be taken to changing (or restoring) society.

Paul I haven’t had such a good laugh for a long time. There are so many fallacies here where to begin.

To be frank you must be a power-hungry megalomaniac who wants to confiscate all the property of those richer than you and put all non-Catholics to death or at least in prision.

But lets be serious, first you know nothing about me. In fact I am one of atheism’s greatest critics.

I am a Christian who takes serious the church’s teaching credere non potest nisi volens. Just because medieval kings were not as tyrannical as the Soviet Union is immaterial they were tyrannical. If the Jus Primae Noctis is not tyrannical than what is?

Todd Lewis, you only make that comment because you only think the goal of man is merely material, I suspect, not the salvation of one’s soul; probably you’re also a practical atheist. In that case, the State should go on, professing no religion. Church teaching absolutely forbids forceful conversions, but at the same time, those baptized are strictly speaking under her fold, even if they fall away later.

I think that fear reasonable but not applicable today, since so many States nowadays don’t even acknowledge a State religion, the United Kingdom’s Anglican Church notwithstanding. Also, I agree these things must be worked out, but at the same time, we must realize the frailty of human nature. Nothing will ever be perfect.

If the State has a role to play in the defense of the Catholic faith, then logically the actions taken against the Spanish Jewish conversos were obligatory. Technically, they were now Catholic and could therefore be tried for heresy. While I understand there were abuses in the system and the system itself was quite fair, I do question the wisdom of trying heretics as criminals at all. After all, that is precisely what Islamic states have done to Muslims who convert to Christianity – that is, recognize them as being under Islamic law and do not treat them as Christian subjects but as heretics worthy of criminal action. In other words, would someone who chose not to be Catholic but was baptized Catholic be allowed to leave his faith?

Are Portugal and Spain still confessional states? How today does that work in practice and – given the falling rates of religiosity in Europe – does it achieve what it is supposed to do – i.e., unite the commonwealth in true worship of God and right ordering of moral principles?

Ideally, I do find the confessional state attractive because the Catholic (Orthodoxy should probably be included) religion is infused visibly into the culture and, ideally, its philosophy becomes the guide to all other activities. This would be a truly unified way of being instead of separating oneself into public and private with all the arts (history, theology, literature, philosophy, etc.) separated from each other as they are in modern universities.

However, as for “no members…were slighted,” I would disagree because at the time of the Wars of Religion baptized Catholics were not joining “a false religion” but a heresy. To my knowledge, the “protestants” then did not have the freedom to worship privately in the sense of having their own church buildings. Certainly, if I remember correctly, the resident Jews were forced to attend Catholic liturgy.

My only concern is that we then can expect other nations to react similarly towards resident Catholics.

Furthermore, would this hypothetical state forbid things such as distribution of religious pamphlets or holy texts? I am aware that the Talmud was prohibited, for example.

I think you forget that for Catholics, enforcing the Catholic religion is natural, since they believe only the Catholic religion is true. Portugal and Spain were the most recent examples of Catholic confessional states, and despite attacks on them, no members of false religions were slighted, although only the public exercise of worship (not private) was curtailed.

After all, this was the state of affairs in the Confessional Age and the Medieval Age. Now, I have tremendous respect for the Medieval Ages (not so much for the post-Renaissance Confessional Age or the 18th century where the Church developed, rightly or wrongly, a very besieged mentality and the State became quite anticlerical and (not to mention an overly rigid form of Thomism) destructive to the beauty of Medieval philosophy); however, one of the reasons why the “Enlightenment” occurred was precisely the rejection of the “cold logic” entailed in Religious Wars of the Reformation Period – namely, defense of Catholic states from heresy.

In any hypothetical Catholic confessional state, what would be the rights and obligations of those of other religions? Now, I agree in theory with Alasdair MacIntyre and Plato in that “actual” pluralism is impossible given objective truths about God and reality. The highest Good, of course, should be corporately recognized if it is indeed the highest good. However, with regards to “practical” pluralism (disregarding any inflammatory or hysterical rhetoric about Inquisitions which I know are greatly exaggerated by “Enlightenment” and Reformation polemics; after all, Catholic doctrine held to no compulsion in religion – in theory; though Charlemagne and Constantine ignored this), what would their freedom to publish materials or hold government office? Would the Index be re-established?

The only reason this concerns me is that if any hypothetical Christendom were to do this, would not Japan or China be justified in barring Jesuit missionaries or persecuting Christians again? Would not our protestations against Islamic dhimmitude of Christians be hypocritical? Would not England be entirely justified in their actions against Anglo-Catholics and the Irish?

It seems the idea that we would ask for religious liberty in other states but then appear to “clamp down” on others when a Cathoic majority is gained is disingenuous.

Now, I’m not saying immediately that this would not be justified. But, this does seem like a logical consequence of this philosophy.

I am calling for what the concerned Protestants of the National Reform Association called for during and after the Civil War in order to prevent the disaster we are now witnessing and which they accurately predicted: America’s corporate recognition of the Social Kingship of Christ as the foundation of law and public policy. Cf. Chs. 18 and 23.

Existing institutions can be made conformable to the law of the Gospel, as Pope Leo XIII made clear in his encyclicals on the subject. There is no need for revolution or monarchy. We need only obey the divine and natural law in public life, refusing to submit the dictates of either to the whims of majority opinion.

Rick Santorum made tentative moves in this direction. We need more such politicians, and of course the leadership of the Catholic hierarchy, without which the social transformation the book advocates cannot happen.

But either we begin to act in the political arena as if we really believe Christ is God and that we face His judgment, or we stand by helplessly as “the dictatorship of relativism” condemned by Pope Benedict inexorably destroys what is left of the moral order.

The book provides practical suggestions in this regard, including a sample Supreme Court decision the life-tenured justices are not only entitled but obliged to issue concerning abortion. The newly adopted Hungarian constitution and the total repeal of permissive abortion laws in Nicaragua are other examples of how the zeitgeist can be rolled back even today.

There are a billion Catholics in world and some 50 million of us in America. The sleeping giant must awake, or, quite simply, the West is doomed.

“Conservatism” and “libertarianism” are but two strains of the same predominating liberalism which has been the suffocating atmosphere that Western man has been breathing for far too long. And now it is almost too late, as the Popes warned again and again before Vatican II. Let’s try something new, shall we?

I am confused. Are you calling for a Christian (Catholic) “dyarchy” to be established in this country? Are you repudiating the Declaration of Independence and the First Ammendment to the Constitution? Or are you saying we have overly embraced the idea of Liberty and extended beyond its true meaning? Are you equating conservatism with libertarianism?

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